Design and Analysis of Optimized Approximate Multiplier Using Novel Higher-Order Compressor

The energy-efficient error-tolerant circuits have paved the way for a whole new area in low-power consumption applications with approximate computing. The approximate computing fulfills the trade-off requirement of exact computation and provides efficient performance. In this paper, a novel energy-efficient multiplier has been proposed for image processing applications. In the multiplication process, compressors are used as an important component for the reduction of partial products. Higher-order approximate 5:2 and 6:2 compressors are also designed and simulated in VIVADO using Verilog coding. The proposed higher-order compressors result in less area and low-power consumption in comparison with the existing state-of-the-art technique. These high-performance compressors are used at the multipliers’ reduction stage, resulting in an energy-efficient circuit for error-tolerant applications. All the simulations were carried out in VIVADO considering 8-bit inputs. Multiplication performance shows 37.77 % (8-bit) improvement in terms of power consumption in comparison to the conventional multiplier. The multiplication process has been done on the original, negative, and sharpened images using their masks. The proposed multiplier shows 51.36% (original image), 6.04% (negative image), and 22.44% (sharpened image) PSNR improvement in comparison to state-of-the-art work.